Hey everybody!

I hope you’re all having a wonderful winter break so far. Today I’m going to be talking about how this year’s winter exhibition went, along with the wrap-up of metaphor machines! This is the project we’ve been working on for the past few months.

Starting off with the exhibition, I was in a group with Finn, Ailie, Jannik, Meghan, Hunter, and Ryan. What our group along with the other grade 9 groups presented were our Metaphor Machines!

What’s a metaphor machine you may ask? It’s a Rube Goldberg machine that features multiple connections, each being a metaphor for something. In this case, each part was a metaphor for the revolution we were assigned! At the beginning of the project, we were told that we would be assigned a revolution to research and that we would then make a Rube Goldberg Machine with at least 6 connections that would symbolize events that happened in our revolution.

I was assigned with Easter Rising (the Irish Revolution), which was one of the shortest yet brutalist revolutions in history. It occurred during the Easter week of 1916, although conflict started before that, in 1912, when the idea of home rule was created. The idea of home rule proposed a separation of Ireland and Britain, which divided Ireland between the Unionists and Nationalists. The unionists wanted Ireland to remain affiliated with Britain, while the nationalists wanted independence.

We started planning our individual connections and how they would connect just before we left for Loon Lake, here’s an early sketch made by Finn:

Then after a week of learning at loon lake, (if your curious about how that went you can find out here).

When we got back, we further developed our connections and how they would look in our final machine. We also got the news that we would also need to create a documentary showing our progress with our machine. I ended up being our cinematographer, Finn was the director, Meghan and Ailie were the hosts, Jannik was our sound engineer, Hunter was the storyboard visionary, and Ryan was our editor (I also helped with editing a bit).

So we also added that to our workflow. Recording was fairly simple; I just set up my phone on my tripod and started recording as we worked. I shot some b-roll, introductions, and information about our revolution and our machine.

Now to face the question I bet your all asking, what made this the most stressful exhibition to date?

We had a group of 7 people, and for about a week, we only had 3 of those people. We had me, Ailie, and Hunter. Why? Everyone got sick!

This had a massive impact on our productivity, as we only had 1 or 2 of us building at once. Since Finn, our engineer, was away, some of the only connections we had left to build were his, and they were hard to understand without him, luckily he was able to explain some connections by drawing them out. This also impacted our ability to film / plan for the documentary. Which is why we unfortunately couldn’t do much for that over the week as we were missing so many people. Luckily, on Monday, we had everybody back, and we got back to work at full strength. There were definitely some times that we all questioned if we would get a working prototype finished for the exhibition; we were literally working on our machine until 5 minutes before the doors opened.

In the end, we met our goal, sort of. We did have everything assembled by the time the doors were open, although our machine did not fully work the entire time. Our machine fully worked about four times without us needing to tamper with it while it was going, which we are proud of! Since our group had one of the longer machines, we didn’t have the majority of our group for a week.

Although this exhibition / project was stressful, in the end it was fun. Since we don’t always get to use half of our school day to build things with hot glue guns, and see our hard work become reality.

And to answer our Driving Question, 

“How do ideas drive change?”

Ideas drive change by challenging the norm, allowing for new perspectives to form, and fostering innovation and progress. When people come up with ideas or different ways of thinking, it opens the possibility for change to occur.

Thanks for reading the post and I’ll see you all again soon for sparks fly!